Insights on the State of Software Infrastructure Testing by IT Operations

Earlier in the year, Research Edge and StackSafe published the third in our series of research reports, IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity. The findings on the state of pre-production testing by IT Operations teams provides significant insight into the challenges organizations face today around pre-production testing by IT operations.

Inadequate IT operations testing is a key reason for changes going awry

• Four out of ten companies consider insufficient pre-production testing a key reason for the downstream production problems faced in implementing changes to multi-tier applications. The other reasons identified for changes going awry are almost all IT operations testing related, including interaction between systems, vendor patches/upgrades, lack of visibility into new apps before going live and in-house patches/upgrades.
• The more changes that are pushed through an organization, the more likely pre-production testing is considered a problem

Delays and rollbacks are common

• Nearly a quarter (22%) of the changes made to applications and the software infrastructure cause significant delays
• More than ten percent of changes are rolled back and never implemented - problems are encountered in production that they simply cannot resolve

Software Infrastructure changes tend to be either not tested at all or not tested thoroughly

• Most companies test changes to the critical applications, but leave many changes to chance.
• Even when production changes are tested, testing is often less than comprehensive, limited to components of the stack. Only 42% testing the entire multi-tier stack

A third of all enterprises lack the capacity to conduct serious pre-release testing

• While most IT department conduct tests, 30% leverage servers or backup data centers, but lack an infrastructure specifically designed for testing and staging
• While the majority (65%) maintain testing or staging environments, utilization is highly variable

If you are interested in the rest of the findings from the study, feel free to download the report here. We will continue to post information from these report that we think are of interest from time to time.

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Filed Under: Change Impact Analysis, Change Management, IT Operations, IT Operations Research, Testing